Local conditions may be different wherever you live, dear reader, but in my city the graffiti, stickers, and other public displays of the "9/11 was an inside job" movement are so numerous that they have become part of the urban landscape, no more noteworthy than stop signs or flyers for band shows. That we are nearing the eighth anniversary of the events in question and the conspiracy theories are only getting more popular is more depressing than it is alarming. Are our lives really so fucking dreary that we've resorted en masse to this kind of delusion as a preferred alternative to reality?

These theories are popular and, if you spend a lot of time reading things with comment sections on the internet, on some days it seems like half the country believes them. The internet isn't a random sample, of course, but the evidence for the popularity of these theories is clear. A Scripps-Howard poll from 2006 showed 16% of people believing it is "likely" that "controlled demolition with explosives" brought down the WTC while a whopping 36% believe that the government knew of the attacks in advance and willingly chose not to act. On the plus side, we might applaud Americans for these "low" numbers…compared to the 55% who believe they are protected by a guardian angel, 20% who believe that God has spoken directly to them, and the full one-third of your friends and neighbors who believe in alien abductions, astrology, and witchcraft. Compared to those figures we look like a nation of solemn skeptics regarding 9/11.

To paraphrase the argument in The Great Derangement, there are three major explanations for the popularity of such opinions. First, Americans are stupid and, in contradiction of everything known about the relationship between wealth and education in the history of civilization, getting stupider. Second, conspiracies about shocking, unbelievable events have always been popular because we can't accept boring explanations for traumatic events. Third, the post-Watergate public is so jaded to governmental malfeasance that even the most idiotic claims seem downright plausible. So many things that we would have considered implausible have actually happened that in order to stay one step ahead of the real news coming out of Washington our imaginations have had to delve into the truly ridiculous.

Of course all three explanations are relevant. We are dumb. We like to think things are more exciting than they are. Watergate, Iran-Contra, Kuwaiti incubator baby hoaxes, and eight years of Bush featuring a war in Iraq based entirely on pure bullshit have put many people in the mindset that no conspiracy is too outlandish to be true. Hell, if I just woke up from a 30-year coma I'd find the possibility of the government having planned 9/11 and a bunch of jurassic neocons starting a war with the evidence used in 2002/2003 to be equally implausible. And one of those things actually happened.

That's not a statement of support for 9/11 conspiracism, i.e. If Iraq happened then maybe this is plausible too. One argument has facts beneath it and the other doesn't. But pushing more and more people to the fringes of plausibility in their beliefs about what our elected leaders are capable of doing is just another negative externality of our carnival sideshow in Iraq. It re-defined what is plausible to younger generations like Watergate did for those before us.

The sad thing is that I love a good conspiracy theory, especially when there are tantalizing shreds of evidence to support them. I do not believe that we know everything we will ever know about 9/11. Over time we will see more information declassified, more offical "we fucked up" admissions (i.e., NORAD admitting that it lied its ass off to the 9/11 Commission), and more facts/evidence uncovered. Personally, I will not be shocked if we someday find conclusive evidence that the Bush administration had far more advance warning about potential attacks than it has thus far admitted. But natural skepticism based on our political system's tendency to withhold information is a far cry from swallowing theories about controlled demolitions, "inside jobs", computer-generated planes, and all of the other horseshit these people believe.

In an era in which the availability of information makes us all self-appointed experts ("I watched WTC 7 videos on YouTube and there was a lot of stuff flying out the windows, which totally looked like an explosion!") this is inevitable, of course. I divide the blame and my anger at the American public for being dumb enough to swallow something so stupid and elected leaders whose actions have gotten so brazen and so corrupt that our imaginations have been forced to go beyond the merely implausible and take up the downright ridiculous in order to stay one step ahead.

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31 Responses to “THE TOOTH FAIRY”

In the videos of the collapse(s), things fly out the windows from pressure. The fires inside the buildings caused the steel to reach temperatures around half the melting point of steel (700C, if I remember correctly). Most of the fire-proofing that was on the steel was knocked off during the impact. The fires burned for approximately 30 minutes which is enough to make the steel pretty damn soft even at half its melting point. The result is that the floor (and walls) begin to sag (the weight of the debris doesn't help either). Eventually, the connection between the floor and the walls breaks, and the floor falls onto the floor below. All the air in between those two floors had no where to go but sideways (out the windows). The result is that the glass of the windows and any light debris that's nearby gets pushed out the windows. Of course, the floor below can't support the weight of the floor above it (the floors are largely made of concrete) and collapses. Hence there's a chain reaction of a floor collapsing and causing the next floor to collapse. Each time, the air being compressed by the floors exits in the same way. This is why it looks like there are explosions before the collapse.

The towers were odd for their time because they had two main clusters of structural support–around the outside of the building and in the center of the building. The typical structure was to have regularly spaced supports throughout the building. If they were built in this way, they would have collapsed almost immediately rather than taking nearly an hour.

On some level, I don't really think the government is competent enough send a piece of mail for me, so there is no way I would ever believe that it is capable of planning and executing the events of 9-11.

An acquaintance once expressed to me a belief in some of the various 9/11 conspiracies dealing with the Bush Administration, and wondered if I was sufficiently outraged. My response was "I don't need to believe these theories to be outraged. The established, accepted facts are enough to make me believe that the administration is too incompetent to run an ice cream store, let alone a government. Do you actually believe that this group of morons could pull off something this impressive and cover it up so effectively?"

My preferred bumpersticker explanation for just about everything is "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." The whole 9/11 mess falls into the Stupidity category: the Bush administration deliberately ignoring warnings, the FBI and CIA not talking to each other, field agents within the FBI not being able to get higher-ups to listen to their concerns, Guiliani insisting on having the NYC emergency operations in the WTC when the WTC had been targeted before, the NY PD and FD using different radio systems, ad nauseum. It's a giant clusterfuck of classic American incompetence and pigheadedness — no conspiracies required to conclude we fucked ourselves.

But that conclusion actually gets to the heart of why we love conspiracy theories — because then no one has to look in the mirror and admit that he or she screwed up big time. Conspiracies move everything into the category of "someone else's fault." We can collectively blame shadowy "others" instead of focusing on what really went wrong.

I have regular brushes with said theorists on the internet as well, and it's quite aggravating.

However, I wonder if the statistic indicating that 36% of the population believes the government "knew" about the attacks and did nothing to stop them might not be so bad. I do know that the infamous "Bin Laden determined to strike the U.S." memo was passed around to the highest levels of the administration, and if I were not careful in responding to such a survey, I might myself answer that way, thinking that the Bush Administration did have "actionable" intelligence and thinking of the Clinton Administration's action in Afghanistan, as well. I might very well answer, to my later regret, that the Bush Administration "knew and did nothing".

Ed –
Your point three is well taken, as are Nan and Andrew's comments.

Point 1 – about stupidity – not so much. What a person believes – and I'm talking about the kind of stuff usually labeled as faith (as in, "a man of___") – is orthogonal to intelligence. I know absolutely brilliant people who believe prayer works, and god (or Moloch, I'm not sure) can and will intercede in their lives.

It's magical thinking, or something close to it, and intelligence or the lack thereof really doesn't come into play.

There are odd facts about the 9/11 situation which foment the conspiracies. There have many many collisions of planes and buildings. The building always wins. Except here. No building has ever been razed from the top down. Fire high in the building causes collapse – I believe this is unprecedented. And it pancaked with near perfection. You really can't plan these things.

1. Claims to have "done their own research". When asked, this "research" consists of browsing conspiracy sites on the internet. However they will talk about their "research" in a way that makes it seem as though they were running experiments on samples in a lab and spending the early morning hours hunched over floor plans in some archive somewhere.

2. Claims government complicity yet wants 9-11 investigated again, and the conspirators brought to justice….presumably by the government.

3. Tries to prove the currently-discussed conspiracy theory with other conspiracy theories… e.g. "Well if they pulled off Pearl Harbor then they could definitely do this!"

4. Using bizarre reasoning, or lack thereof, they will attempt to refute some of the most obvious problems with their whole theory. For example, when pointing out how many people would be needed for such a conspiracy(thousands), they will insist that it would only take a few people, with everyone else on a "need to know basis". As though the innocent demolition company hired to rig the towers wouldn't find it very suspicious.

5. Totally unfamiliar with the science and fields they are discussing, such as engineering, demolitions etc.

6. Insist that the "official story" is the real conspiracy theory because it involves a conspiracy. When pointing out that we are using a commonly accepted definition of "conspiracy theory" that does not mean simply the presense of a conspiracy in an explanation, they will ignore this.

7. Better yet, they will insist that the "official story" is absurd because it constitutes a "coincidence theory", that is it has many coincidences in it. Of course if we ignore the fact that the 9/11 conspiracy theory has many coincidences, e.g. they needed to destroy three towers, killing people only in two of them, then one hit to the Pentagon and one crash in a field, we would do well to note that nearly ALL historical events contain interesting, convenient, and often inconvenient coincidences. The idea that the presence of coincidences in a historical event should put the whole event into question is absolutely retarded beyond belief. Choose any major battle of say, WWII, for example, and you will find dozens of coincidences and seemingly impossible feats.

8. Slightly veiled racism, in the form of "DO YOU REALLY THINK 19 CAMEL JOCKEYS WHO LIVE IN CAVES COULD PULL THIS OFF?" Of course these 19 men were better educated than many 9/11 truthers. One wonders as to how the "camel jockeys" ever managed to create one of the greatest civilizations in the Middle Ages, conquer formerly European territory, and more recently pull off the crossing of the Suez in 1973, something far more difficult than hijacking four planes.

9. Claims to be "just asking questions". Of course they don't answer any questions about their theory, and when they ask their questions(which sound a hell of a lot more like accusations), they refuse to accept answers they don't like.

10. Troofers will usually focus on one subject, i.e. WTC 7, Flight 93, Pentagon, etc. until they are completely exhausted by the barrage of incoming facts. Each time they will move on to a new specific subject, usually starting with…"Ok then smart guy/neocon shill. How do you explain ……then?"

11. While claiming the official story is "absurd", "illogical", etc., they rarely are even aware of what the "official story" is. Rarely have they personally read the 9/11 commission report, and they often repeat nonsense like "Fire couldn't melt the steel!". When you point out that nobody ever claimed that fire melted the steel, they will ignore it. Often times, their claims about the basic facts of the official story are wrong, so the "holes" they point out are not really holes at all.

12. If that weren't bad enough, they even misquote THEIR own sources, for example, claiming that Stephen Jones found traces of "thermate" in the WTC debris, when in fact he only claimed to have found sulfur(which is a common ingredient in drywall and office ceiling panels). They will claim Larry Silverstein said "we made the decision to pull" when in fact he said that THEY(the fire department) made the decision. (Not to mention the idiocy of claiming this guy would admit complicity on a taped interview, and the fact that pull does not mean destroy a building via CD, and the word pull was used several times that very day in reference to the rescue effort).

Bottom line, these people are retards. The world of politics is too complicated and scary for them to understand, so they invent a bogeyman which despite being fearsome, plays by their rules. That's why they can believe that the government somehow keeps all the potential whistleblowers afraid to speak out, but they won't touch Alex Jones. No different from a little kid who imagines that their are monsters in the closet, but they won't be able to hurt him if he hides under his blanket. Years of influence from mass media pushing belief in UFOs, conspiracies, etc., lack of critical thinking, and pathetic methods of teaching history are taking their toll.

Aslan beat me to it.
But on another note, don't single out your fellow Americans for chastisement- gullibility is worldwide . Idiots are an international community. E.g.:
1) Russia: has the world's largest neo- Nazi movement. Apparently these clowns haven't read Mein Kampf, or at least the part where the Slavs are described as untermenschen.
2) In the Congo Republic, it is believed that raping a virgin will cure AIDS.
3) Jesus appears in various items of food in Latin America.
4) Throughout the Middle East there is an urban legend about mysterious " Jewish" doctors who kidnap children and perform medical experiments on them.
5) In Great Britain, people there still believe that the crop circles were caused by alien spacecraft, despite being proven a hoax.

They employ the scientific method in reverse. Begin with the conclusion, pick out all of the evidence that supports it (often using bizarre, contorted reasoning), disregard the mountains of disconfirming evidence, and decide that the utterly implausible scenario they've concocted is in fact the only possible and logical conclusion one could reach based on the evidence.

It's part of a broader and more depressing societal trend of doing "research" (i.e., watching YouTube videos) and deciding that we are experts on any subject that becomes relevant in the course of world affairs – physics, engineering, architecture, chemistry, government…..

It’s part of a broader and more depressing societal trend of doing “research” (i.e., watching YouTube videos) and deciding that we are experts on any subject that becomes relevant in the course of world affairs – physics, engineering, architecture, chemistry, government…..

People have always congregated and blustered on various technical or political subjects of the day without the benefit of a clue at pubs, bars, local clubs, PTA meetings, town hall meetings, etc.

it just seems like the internet is turning the world in a giant bubbling pot of aggressively ignorant positions.

I suppose my hope is that there's a point where credible information begins to drown out the ignorance. Snopes seemed to be getting there, for a while. Perhaps Wikipedia's model of open editing combined with trusted editors confirming the edits against credentialed sources will work. To be honest, though, that really sounds like magical Libertarian-style thinking, to suggest that more of the same will solve the problem that lots of the same has caused, now that I've typed it out.

I have to disagree to a degree. My wife is a professional statistician; she's intelligent and well-educated. And yet, for most of her adult life, outside of what she's working on, she seems incapable of choosing the simple, obvious diagnosis when a complex, unlikely one is available. Thank goodness she's not an EMT – if presented with a person suffering from flu-like symptoms, I suspect that she would immediately decide that he had Smallpox or was the victim of weaponized anthrax. I don't understand why this is the case, but she's been doing this in every aspect of her non-professional life for as long as I've known her, some 25 years. Where I prefer to start with the most likely and rule out possibilities as I go to the least likely, she works in the other direction. It can be wildly frustrating, and even raising two children hasn't changed her approach. I suspect she's not unique, either.

The problem John, comes from the fact that we don't teach criticial thinking in schools. As a result, people who are highly intelligent and educated can rationalize their way into believing in something not-so-intelligent.

As an addition to the checklist I provided, I thought it is worth pointing out that Ron Paul supporters, often Troofers themselves, were known to use similar tactics, specifically, pretend to be a skeptic who was "convinced" by their "personal research"(read: browsing Prison Planet and watching Loose Change). Like any conspiracy theorist, the Ron Paul supporters like to believe that they are somehow above all us dumb sheeple, and thus we will believe them when they pretend to be a "liberal" who found out that Paul's ideas make sense.

It's odd where you will run into a troofer. They aren't all normally conspiracy theorists. A coworker of mine is highly skeptical of many subjects and we frequently would discuss things (superstition, woo, UFOs, etc.) when we were just shooting the shit and always found the humor in those beliefs. One day I forwarded on a 9/11 conspiracy debunking video on youtube that I found funny (it was done in a humorous way) and I came to find out that he bought into the conspiracy! Not in a heavy handed forum-posting way, but he said that he would not be surprised if he found out the whole thing was an inside demo job. I was like… wtf? It totally caught me off-guard.

However, all that said, I don't personally think we are getting worse. I think the internet makes it seem that way because the conspiracy theorists have such an easier time finding each other, but I'm not convinced more people believe in impossible silly claims than ever before in history. I would love to see a study on this though. I'm not sure how you would effectively measure it without bias and keep it relevant over decades, but it would be very interesting to see if we are getting, well, dumber in that respect.

Oh I should point out that I agree that critical thinking skills need to be taught more and taught young. However, I would assume that fundies would be highly opposed to that since it would give kids the tools needed to see that things like intelligent design is absolute silliness. Because of that, you would have a hard time getting higher critical thinking standards into schools. At least for now.

One likely source of eagerness to believe in conspiracy theories is long-term political impotence. A populace repeatedly thwarted in its attempts to change things by political means or have substantial input into governance will come to believe that malevolent, all-powerful forces are always at work against them. Look up statistics on how many people, in the Middle East, believe global politics is dictated by the inexorable cabal of Jewish-Masonic financiers and media moguls — it makes for sobering reading. Likewise, in Russia and parts of East Europe, large swathes of middle age and elderly people still believe the West is out to get them.

I agree with comrade x; this is a fascinating post that generated some good discussions, but the tendency to believe in conspiracies is a universal phenomenon and we need to study it as such. I don't think we'll find in answers by looking at the peculiarities of American culture in the post-Nixon years. Stupidity certainly plays a large part, but I think part of it is that the belief in sinister forces manipulating things behind the scenes kind of absolves people of responsibility.

1) If critical thinking skills were taught in school, there would be no conservatives. Why do you thing they came up with All Children Left Behind?
2) Crop Circles are tot the handiwork of aliens. I saw it on YouTube. So there!

Look, I don't know what I believe about 9/11. Maybe I'm a conspiracy agnostic. I don't think we've ever gotten a concise, reliable story. I'm not sure why people think that the government's version is so much more believable that others floating out there.

What I really don't get is why people feel so threatened by questioning the official story. Troofer? Really? I, for one, don't think aliens are beaming us up regularly, there is no Easter bunny, and the Illuminati thing is pretty much out there. But everybody who thinks there's something hinky about the official story shouldn't be dismissed as crazy or stupid.

If someone killed my brother and the police arrested a guy and charged him, I'd like to know that he actually did it. And if parts of the story didn't add up, I'd like for questions to be asked. I'd rather arrest the real murderer. So why don't we expect the same from our own government?

So, go ahead. Pile on. But I think it's more stupid to accept flimsy answers than to ask questions.

We don't find it threatening, we find it profoundly retarded. Big difference.

You know who offers a more plausible explanation than that flimsy Government Story? Alex Jones, Jerome Corsi, and armies of 16 year olds lecturing people on physics, architecture, and building demolition while doing "research" on YouTube.

"The official story is laughably absurd and 9/11 is obviously an inside job", that is a common mantra of troofers, and it is NOT a question. I will say it again- ask all the questions you want. When you get answers, accept them, even if it wasn't the answer you wanted. If you plan to advance an alternative hypothesis, you had better expect people to ask you to answer questions as well. I have seen NIST, Popular Mechanics, and a number of other authoritative sources respond to the ceaseless "questions" of conspiracy nuts. Yet I have in over 5 years never found a conspiracy nut willing to answer my questions about their hypothesis, which is usually nothing more than: "anything but what the government says happened."

Am I saying that I will never believe 9/11 was a government conspiracy? Absolutely not, I will believe it 100% the day that someone can provide me convincing evidence that it was, and not a minute sooner.

Do I feel threatened by questions? Hell know, I am annoyed by it. As a lover of history and someone who considers himself an amateur historian, I have nothing but the deepest contempt for people who spread conspiratorial thinking, which is the antithesis of good historical research.

A "common mantra of troofers"? Everybody who has questions can't be lumped into one big stupid group.

Yes, I've read the 9/11 Commission report. No, I also think Alex Jones is a few cards short of a deck. I didn't say that it was a government conspiracy. I think it's possible that a lot of discrepancies could be explained by mistakes, bad judgment, and people basically not doing their jobs. I don't know how a plane got into restricted DC airspace without being accosted out of there or shot down. And I don't know why all the local videos were confiscated. If it was explained, I might understand it. It's little stuff like this that makes the public leap to weird explanations of their own.

And an historian who holds contempt for people with questions? Really? Good historians delve into matters and try to get the full picture. They appreciate good research instead of finding those researchers contemptible. Consider this ongoing research. It's not that I don't "like the answers", it's that I find some of the answers to be so far from "Occam's Razor" as to be laughable.

I see you are a little confused there LJ. It's not "peopel asking questions" I have a problem with, it's people who first make outrageous accusations and then try to claim they are questions. You know, like "I find some of the answers to be so far from Occam's Razor as to be laughable." See that's not a question. Questions end with these things called question marks, which look like this: ?

Second, Occam's Razor has limitations. The simplest explanation is USUALLY the correct one. When we get into complex issues like engineering, few explanations are going to be simple.

Conspiracy theorists are not merely "asking questions". That is intellectual cowardice.

If you have problems with "the answers", I suggest you start at 911myths.com.

Something I want to add to the above- I will happily consider alternate theories to the mainstream 9-11 narrative, just as soon as someone can give me some credible evidence for such a theory. The fact that some aspects of the "official" narrative haven't been answered to the satisfaction of every individual on the internet, or that some things may seem strange or contradictory, does not cause me to raise an eyebrow. This is normal in any complicated event. Read several authoritative books on the same battle in WWII, for example, and you will find many contradictions, as well as unanswered questions.

Never happene Cld actually. You see, when you read enough about it as I have, you find far too many contradictions, unanswered questions, and absurdities. Clearly the official story is nothing but a big hoax. Oh but hey, I'm just asking questions here!

All the fussing about windows bursting and rates of debris descent just ignore the human factor, the factor that makes the "inside job" idea laughable. How could The Gang That Couldn't Shoot [Iraq] Straight pull off and maintain the biggest conspiracy of modern times, even after leaving power?

Here's just one point of attack; there are many others. Hundreds of people, at the very least, would have to have been involved. To plant the charges, the engineering staff at the Twin Towers would have to be in on it, or they'd notice the charges and sound the alarm. Not one of those engineers had a problem with murdering thousands of people they worked with daily? Not one had a conscience? Not one was horrified at the war he'd helped get his country into? Not one got drunk at a bar years later and gave the game away? Not one sent an anonymous letter to the NY Times saying, if you want to know what really happened, start checking here, here, and here? (Example: Who supplied the explosives? Where were they bought?)

No. A conspiracy like that could never have held together this long. Too many people involved, too many chances for human weakness to break it all apart. I can not believe it.

Anyone who had inside knowledge of the conspiracy and blew the whistle, would become the greatest hero in American history. We're talking about their face replacing Ben Franklin's on the 100 dollar bill. Moreoever, whatever faction that could explose the conspiracy would immediately destroy their opponents- the Republican party would most likely totally collapse and have to be replaced, and all American political life changes radically. Yet for some reason- no conspirators come forward. Oh sure, they must fear for their lives, more than all those other whistleblowers throughout history who exposed real conspiracies despite an obvious threat to their lives. And why the hell are Alex Jones, Dylan Avery, Bermas, et al still alive? Hey, I'm just asking questions!!

This entire posting and all the responses are not supposed to be about 9/11, right? We're all just talking about the "troofers" being idiots.

Of course the troofers ruin their own case. On the other hand, the official story contains a lot of bullshit. Slamming the troofers is just shooting fish in a barrel. Forget them. But — if the official story is bullshit — what then?

Skipping the points that are just plain ridiculous (if they could do Pearl Harbor, they could do this), there are many of bones of contention. You know them all. But the fact that the Troofers are jabbering idiots doesn't just wipe them off the table. I agree with you that these people are dorks, but meanwhile… what the fuck happened?

We should banish the word "conspiracy." Too much baggage. It has become a code word to identify people who wear tin foil hats to keep out the radio waves. Besides, the official explanation for 9/11 is a conspiracy theory as well. If you do not believe that Kennedy was killed by one gunman, and/or do not believe in the "magic bullet" theory, does that make you a "conspiracy theorist?"

I do not purport to know squat about what happened. I do know what has been officially stated, and some of it is wrong. Critical thinking suggests that if something is bullshit, then a different thing must be true… no?

As far a the technical stuff goes, I am not an engineer, aviator, metallurgist, firefighter,demolitions expert, or forensic investigator. But I do read what I can that has been written by these people. Of course, it is inconclusive. There is much disagreement. But there are a few points up for debate.

One example: Perhaps I am showing my ignorance here, but what about molten steel? The temperatures required, the firefighters reporting that they saw it streaming like lava and couldn't get near certain areas for weeks because of it. And then NIST stating flatly, on camera, that there were NO pools of molten steel?

I am not making a case for or against anything. I just haven't heard anything truly convincing either way. And these are not differing accounts of battles, or whatever some other poster said about WWII. These are topics that change the entire understanding of the event. I am just wondering if you guys wonder about any of that stuff when you're taking a rest from picking the low-hanging fruit and bashing the troofers. Surely there is disagreement among this crowd on some of these points. You should forget the lunatic fringe and discuss the substance.

As I said, go to 911myths.com and you can look up all you want about "molten steel." Just out of curiousity- why would you expect explosives to have anything to do with steel melting? That is not what demolition charges do.